From now on I should only listen to those people who offer me both honesty and acceptance, or so says my horoscope for today, Tuesday the 22nd of May 2007. Sometimes it feels like I am overwhelmed with people like this, surrounded by true friends… other times it feels like I can count those honest and accepting people on one hand… or one finger, or even none at all.

As anyone who knows me or reads this blog with any regularity (and all of you who read this blog period know me, so really there’s no difference in those two groups) knows, I tend to be exuberantly, excessively passionate about the people that I choose to care about. I let people in very easily… for some reason, I still have the ability to trust, and to be sometimes painfully honest and open about my life and my feelings. In the past few months, I feel like that quality (and after much thought I have decided it’s a quality, damnit a VICTORY that I’m able to be that way), has been used, abused and torn to shreds, stomped on, shat on, pissed on and set on fire.

And yet, I continue to hope for the good in people, and the good in God, and the idea that it’ll all work out in the end if I just keep on going.

A few weeks ago, I lost someone I considered to be a friend… She sent me emails full of vitriol and anger, but I knew I’d lost her the second I started dating a boy, and right in front of her (how dare I) about a month before. She stopped talking to me, stopped confiding in me, started talking about me behind my back…and ultimately disappeared from my life completely, leaving something of a shambles behind her. I don’t care if “something of a shambles” doesn’t make grammatical sense – I rather like the sound of it.

The funny thing is, I also lost the boy I was dating who “caused” all of it. That is the one thing, however, that I don’t blame him for. Her heterophobia is not his fault (although it was his fault when he used her as an excuse to pick a fight with me because my friends didn’t like him (1 of them) when his friends hated and insulted me). The reason I ultimately lost the boy? … After dating for less than a month, I still refused to have sex with him. He needed, he said, a physical relationship (I don’t know what else you would call much of our relationship, though… basically what he wanted was the ability to stick his penis into my vagina, and I said no, I wasn’t ready.)

So, he pretended that things were okay, and told me he had no problem waiting. And then slowly stopped talking to me. He’d call me late at night only after everything else in his life had been attended to. He stopped text messaging me or returning my messages, and then got angry when I asked him why I hadn’t heard from him in days. Ultimately, after my asking him multiple times to just tell me what was going on, with no response from him, he blatantly ignored me for a week and then said he was “cutting his losses”… he was getting out because I wasn’t putting out.

That was the last I heard from him.

We were all taken in. My friends and I… people who don’t normally trust that boys are capable of being real human beings. We believed what he said, *I* believed him when he said he was crazy about me and he’d wait until I was ready. And it turned out to be an act – it turned out to be an ultimatum… either have heteronormative sex with me right now or I’m walking away.

Well of course I chose the walking away.

Call me crazy, but I think that sexual contact should mean something, and so I am wrecked over the fact that I kissed him, that I wasted kisses on him, that I believed he was who he claimed to be… and that no one warned me, not a single person. I ultimately blame myself for being taken in, and being screwed over. And knowing that no one is going to stop him from moving on to the next girl and pressuring her into sleeping with him – and in this town, it’s not hard to find a lot of girls who will. His behavior was absolutely disgusting, and I’m still in shock over it. I’m angry about it. I’m not angry at him for what he did to *me*, I’m angry that he thought he had the right to treat any human being the way he treated me. I’m angry that I met him when he assistant directed my performance of The Vagina Monologues, and so I assumed certain things, things he claimed to be true… that ultimately weren’t. He wasn’t feminist friendly. He was not an ally.

He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and he’s going to do it again. It is all I can do not to resort to egging his car, or slashing his tires, or starting a website devoted to making sure no girl ever falls victim to his bullshit again.

Because you can’t just say you’re crazy about someone, that however and whatever they want this relationship to be, they’re in… and then utterly and completely vanish from their lives because they won’t open their legs. And you can’t do that and call yourself anything but a misogynist. You can’t do that and work in the feminist community. You can’t do that, you can’t sit in my living room and mock The Monologues or bitch about how much you hate your friends and then turn around and put them ahead of your girlfriend every single time and wonder why it is that they want to know what the hell happened to change you so drastically in such a small amount of time.

The truth was, he hadn’t changed. I’d just bought the lie, and then the mask came off. And I hadn’t been wearing one. And he’d been wearing several.

I’m able to write about this now because I’m over the “us” of it all. I’m over *him*… in fact, I wasn’t even sure I liked him enough to keep the relationship going much longer. I was still testing the waters. I was still figuring out if I could trust him. But to a certain extent, as I do with all of my friends, all of the people I spend time with, I had let him in to some small extent.

Pissed and shat all over, that was me. Twice in as many weeks. Actually twice in less than two weeks. First him, then her.

So when my horoscope says to listen only to those people who are honest and accepting, I have to wonder if my radar isn’t off. If maybe I have no clue who the people are that I know that are honest and accepting, and safe. If maybe I’ve got this whole friendship thing wrong somehow. If maybe I should just shut down. Although that means they win.

If you’re one of those honest and accepting people, feel free to say so now. If you’re not, feel free to say so as well. I’d just like to know into which baskets I should put my eggs.

So I’m coming down from two of the worst days of my entire life, during which I spent most of my time attempting not to throw up, staying out of my house, going to the lake and … oh, right, there was that bit where the cops came to my apartment because someone called my University and alerted the Dean to the fact that I was suicidal. Which was funny, because I wasn’t. But at least now we know that the City of Chapel Hill takes its random student phone calls very very seriously.

The problem is, I’m already on record as being “suicidal” from back in March when they hospitalized me (I wasn’t then, either, but I finally got to hear the notes from the meeting with the therapist and damn if she didn’t make me sound like I had a gun in my mouth). I had to fill out all this paperwork to stay in school and not have to, you know, get thrown out on a medical and have to reapply after taking a year off – something I really thought I was going to have to do two months ago… something I cannot cannot do now.

So now there are reports filed with the Dean saying that, in fact, I am still a head case. The same Dean who had to be convinced I wasn’t so I could continue going to school.

And the girl who called… to whom I’d said all of “I’m having a bad day” before saying we’d meet up at the pool in my complex that afternoon to hang out and cheer me up… now says she’s sorry if I hate her, and if I got thrown out of school, but it was “better safe than sorry.”

I am so sick of better safe than sorry.

I am sick of a lot of things.

I am mostly sick of confusion and misunderstanding and frustration, and right now, El Boyo is bringing a lot of that into my life. Before I met him I was not sane, but I was pretty well established in my interactions with people. The people I knew I’d known forever, I could read, I could understand… this learning someone else thing is making me sick to my stomach. This not being sure if someone is trustworthy, or … just not being sure of anything really. I asked Diary of a Fangirl if she would have a problem with me if I were a lesbian, and she paused and then said “…no.” Because really, I think I am just much more comfortable with women and emotional relationships with women than I am with guys. I have guy friends and they drive me insane. I’m talking out of my ass right now because I have no idea what to even say about the entire situation. I am confused, and I am sick to my stomach, and El Boyo is confusing me and making me sick to my stomach (not cause he’s gross, just because my stomach is tied in knots). And finals are this week and I still don’t know if I get to, you know, keep going to school.

And that’s my life with entirely too many ellipses. Did anyone understand that?

I can’t begin to explain the way I’ve been feeling for the last few weeks. I don’t think there are words to explain it. I wrote the most incredibly personal final paper for my English 666 course and turned it in on Tuesday. There’s no doubt I’ll get a horrible grade on it, but it seemed like it marked a turning point in my writing. There was something more raw in it than there usually is in anything I say or do.

Maybe because I was actually telling the truth.

Things have been a roller coaster of insanity. I’m not sure whether I’m going up or down. Everything that should make me smile makes me cry, and everything that should make me cry makes me cry harder. I got to school early this morning and no one was in my Economics classroom, so instead of turning on the lights in this huge hall I just waited until my eyes adjusted and walked down to my usual seat. It’s completely dark except for the exit signs above the back doors, the light from the hallway way back behind the 50 odd rows of seats and this laptop monitor. I wish it would just stay this dark. I wish I could curl up in a ball on the floor, with all of the toe jam and old gum and empty water bottles of thousands of entitled Carolina students, and sleep for a million years. Sleep until it all made sense.

A question for those of you with sane and stable relationships: How does one go about being an emo and moody girl while dating a non-emo or moody boy? Especially when said emo girl doesn’t feel comfortable sharing her emo-ness because of said non-emo boy’s lack of it?

The apartment hunting yesterday went… particularly well. Herein is a true account of all that happened.

Sparklepants and I drove down a few nice, tree-lined streets off of a main strip through our town. We said “oh. This is not bad. This is rather pretty.”

We turned into the parking lot. I blinked. David Gray was on the iPod singing “smile like you mean it.” So I tried to listen to him. I did not want Sparklepants to think I was rushing to any decisions. There were no trees. We parked the car and got out. We went to the apartment we were supposed to be seeing. We could hear other people in there, being shown the place. We knocked a few times, but there was no response. We stood on the front stoop.

We listened to them talk about how there’s no dishwasher, and yes, the kitchen is very small. The window units for air conditioning. Etc. We stood there and listened for twenty minutes while no one responded to our knock/s on the door. We stood there while the smell of cat pee permeated the air. We stood there another seven minutes. At which point it had been about half an hour since the realtor person had told us we needed to show up. I was very grumpy. I was very hungry. I did not want to be there. I hated the place. It smelled and the people were…wow, really rude and not on time.

I looked at Sparklepants and said “I’m making an executive decision” right as she said “let’s go.”

So we, feeling like we were the rude ones in leaving, snuck back to our car and tried to whisper/talk until we were “out of hearing range” of the woman who clearly couldn’t hear that she had prospective clients on the goddamn doorstep for a half an hour while they went back to look at this that and the other thing again.

We went to see Adam Brody in a movie, and he was Adamy and Brodyish.

Someone felt the need to clue me in on details of the life of an ex-boyfriend that I would really rather shoot in the head than hear about ever again. Then I tried really hard not to be very, very grumpy and it didn’t work. I got home to a letter that was so incredibly mean and condescending that it alternately made me want to cry and feel very bad about myself and drive very far to the place where the person who wrote it lived and shoot THEM in the head. Then I took a shower. Then I realized I had forgotten something very important and ran straight from the shower to the car, stopping only very quickly to clothe myself, and drove to campus to help out a friend whom I had FORGOTTEN NEEDED MY HELP. THEN I GOT LOST ON THE WAY BACK FROM CAMPUS! Then I got home and got in a fight with El Boyo via text message, which really, after the rest of the night I should have known better. The night proceeded downward from there.

So we spent the night watching El Boyo jazz hands his way through being a member of Hitler’s army, oh, and also reacting emphatically to what people around him were saying. If there were an Oscar (oh, I’m sorry a TONY) for emphatic facial reactions, I would definitely say he won it.

I am still trying to figure out exactly how… okay it is for me discuss El Boyo on this blog. So bear with me while the dust settles and I drill this hole right into solid plaster and try to hang a 59 pound painting from it. When things crash down, ignore the screaming – it’s probably just a broken toe or something.

Then we had entirely too many French Fries, and I ate them ALL. And then they got cold, and I lost interest in food, and then I lost interest in everything and was grumpy for awhile, and then I watched King of the Hill and was EMPHATICALLY grumpy. With facial expressions! And I think *I* could have won some sort of award for my emphatic grumpiness, the aftereffects I’m still sort of trying to puzzle through this morning.

I feel like I’m back in ‘Nam. With the land mines and the fox holes and the what not.

Today we go to look at another townhouse. I have my heart set on one we’ve already seen, but this is cheaper and closer to town, and I know we have to comparison shop…but…FOREST! Forest that smells like the Sierra Nevada! Forest that reminds me of home and summers on the American River! A Deck! A closet into which I can fit both a chair AND my guitar and be very emo for HOURS if I choose to. And write songs! That are emphatic! And grumpy! And reactionary! A closet in which I can fling myself about and get streaks of mascara on the walls and bemoan the emo sadness of my life and be completely non-conformist – just like every other highschool student who listens to The Cure. I can eat chocolate in my closet!

But I must not get too attached to my closet. I must hold myself back. And I must go watch an Adam Brody movie instead of writing a 22 page paper which is due Tuesday – the paper, not the Adam Brody movie. And I will see it DESPITE the horrible reviews it is getting, because it is Adam Brody! And he is very ADAMY in his BRODYISHNESS. And then I will ogle rugs and lamps at Urban Outfitters which I cannot afford! And maybe even get more paint samples! But there will be no cleaning of my room today! Why? BECAUSE I AM GRUMPY! AND REACTIONARY! AND DISINTEGRATION WAS THE BEST ALBUM EVER!!

Currently Reading

Eve Ensler, Insecure At Last

Brettell and Sargent, eds. Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Quoth the Raven:

"Girls aren't beautiful, they're pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know, that they have lost something and picked up something else."